Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You

These discussions are the other side of friendship. The conversations and the memories and the fun you have together permit you to reveal the weak, scared vulnerable self that emerges every now and again. My second operation – the one I had to chop the pesky tumours out of my liver, six months after my diagnosis and my first op – was tough. It took place in a shiny, cancer-defeating factory in Houston, because Billy’s careful research had shown that it had the best chance of successfully ridding me of cancer. We spent nearly a month there, and Stateside I was the glummest of glum girls. The operation depleted me in a way I could never have imagined. Agonisingly painful. Full of complications and miserable rehospitalisations. I finally returned home feeling drained of everything, including optimism. This was ironic, as post-operation I was in a better place, statistically, than I’d been since my original diagnosis six months previously: my odds of surviving the next five years leapt (briefly) from 6 per cent to 50 per cent. And yet for me it was the darkest part of the night. Maybe because everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and thought the crisis was over. Maybe because I was physically weaker than I’ve ever been. I don’t know why, but for several months there was a loneliness to my sadness which I hadn’t experienced before.

In that kind of situation, there are two options. The first is to battle through on your own. To grit your teeth, put your head down, and say things will be better tomorrow (whenever tomorrow comes). I call this the Scarlett O’Hara; it is a noble approach, one I’ve taken before, and one that I know appeals to the proud, quiet, maybe more masculine side of all of our natures. But I chose the second option, which was to write a list of my best women, and ask them to come and help. We sat in the garden. The tulips were out, and I howled snottily on their shoulders in a way I hadn’t before. After that I told them about my fears and loneliness, and how bloody awful everything had been. Then things got better.

Not long before the Nuisance, my fear had been that the really good times were over for these wonderful friendships. Thirty-somethings with children, jobs and partners to attend to, we were no longer as available to one another as we used to be. While I might wish we all lived in some kind of giant child-rearing commune, that isn’t the case. Friendships survive on scraps of time and emails, squeezed between the rest of life, and very often conducted thousands of miles apart. We live off well-trodden stories, the space in our lives for making new memories mostly taken up by family and work, where the real drama happens. The odd dinner, more often a cup of tea balanced precariously over a baby’s head while we converse, but never enough time for the real stuff, or for new adventures together. I always hoped there would be time for that again, if only in the Home for Neglected Mothers of Sons in which we would end up in our dotage. But now it seems that I won’t be checking into that particular nursing home. All the same, there is a happy postscript to this story, at least in Nuisance land. As one of these wise women says, quoting Mike Tyson, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ We all had our plans. Our paths criss-crossed as we got on with life, friendships always there when they needed to be picked up. But then my family got punched in the face, far earlier and far harder than we could have expected, and our plans melted away. Suddenly time was carved out for friendship again. So cancer has given as well as it has taken – though perhaps it is more accurate to say that our friendships take from it what they can, a collective two fingers to all the Nuisance stands for.

I have spent so much of the past few years under the spell of chemotherapy, existing in a half-life where every fortnight is split into seven days of misery and seven days of life. Aside from (temporarily) taming my cancer, the other benefit of having this wicked set of toxins poured into me is that I see more of my resplendent friends from around the world than I have done for years. I am accompanied into the chemo ward. I am visited at home. This is lucky, because ‘therapy’ is a complete misnomer for the cruel concoction of drugs which is infused into my bloodstream in an attempt to keep me alive. But it has to be done: as Claudius puts it in Hamlet, ‘Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all.’

I imagine my own desperate appliance as a particularly inept vigilante marauding through my body on the hunt for cancer cells. He shoots – he kills! Oh no. More often than not, what he has slaughtered is a perfectly healthy cell just going about its taste-creating, nausea-controlling, body-hydrating business. Chemo is all about this clumsy collateral damage and how to manage it: hence the phalanx of steroids, anti-nausea pills and so on, each of which brings its own wicked side-effects. But what I hadn’t reckoned with was the mental stuff. My vigilante seems particularly adept at shooting down serotonin, so that for a few days the chemicals replace my soul with a shrivelled black void. With each cycle the physical and emotional scar tissue deepens. I elect to return, but only just.

If I wasn’t accompanied by my very own Terracotta Army of friends, returning to the chemo ward would be harder. They make things bearable. They understand the little things. That, even facing death, for me (like Hillary Clinton and her scrunchies) it’s still all about the hair (and lack thereof). That seeing the oncologist is easier when I’m in a tough-girl leopardskin coat with a slick of bright red lippy. That though my heart’s desire cannot be granted, that doesn’t mean I don’t desire stuff. The ancient Egyptians had it right – the urge to accumulate beautiful treasures increases the closer you get to death; and I intend to go into the afterlife looking polished, surrounded by the luxury goods given to me by the best women. They understand the big things too: how I need to live in Technicolor in the time I can. They plan holidays. We visit Paris in the rain. They take me to the newest restaurants, and send me extravagant bunches of flowers and richly scented candles so that in the evening I can draw the curtains and pretend that everything is just fine.

I sometimes sit in my chair, too tired to move, too brain-dead to read or write. With my eyes closed, I feel a pleasant weight pressing on my shoulders. It is the weight of all the time Billy and I have had with our friends, enveloping me like a heavy blanket. They are brave, these people. They were there the day after I was diagnosed, uninvited, hugging Billy and regaling me with tales of dreadful in-laws that made me laugh so much my new scar throbbed through the morphine. They are there when I come out of the claustrophobic scanning machines, squeezing my hand as I fretfully try to interpret every look the radiographers give each other. They arrive at our door with elaborate dishes for lunch, and then stay to do the washing up. Part of the reassuring weight I feel from these friendships comes from the discussions we have had about Afterwards. These are the kind of friends who want to be in my children’s lives forever. The kind of friends who will buy seven-seater cars to ferry them around as well as their own families. The kind of friends who will tell stories of Mummy long after she’s gone. The kind of friends who will pick Billy up when gritting his teeth and saying tomorrow will be a better day just doesn’t cut it.